Tien Chiu

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You are here: Home / Archives for painted warp

February 18, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Pondering colors

I picked out a set of colors for the tiger-eye yardage today:

1st attempt at colors for tiger eye yardage
1st attempt at colors for tiger eye yardage

I was all set to use them, and then I decided to run a simulation in Photoshop.  I’m glad I did, because this looks NOTHING like what I had in mind:

color simulation, 1st set of colors
color simulation, 1st set of colors

Mind you, it’s not unattractive, just not what I was envisioning.  I wanted a cool, restful look in warm golds, beiges, and browns, and the orange “punches up” the excitement level too much.

What I am looking for is more like my first simulation:

original simulation
original simulation

So I took the core colors of the color gradients and put them into a “swatch” image:

tiger eye color swatches
tiger eye color swatches

Now, of course, I’m stuck.  Color matching yarn to a monitor color is tricky to impossible, and my printer mangles colors, so I’m not quite sure how to get from A to B.  Obviously it doesn’t have to be a perfect color match, but I’d like it to be close enough to get a similar effect.  I am definitely going to have to dye sample skeins for this one!  I have a few of the shades in my “library”, but not all.

Which means hauling out the pH meter and my sample skeins, syringes, etc.  Just as well – I could use a refresher on precision dyeing.  It’s been a couple months since the dye study group, and I want to make sure I don’t get rusty.

Plans for this weekend:

  • farmer’s market Saturday morning
  • run up to Sharon’s on Saturday afternoon for final fitting, interfacing evaluation
  • Stitches West (a knitting convention, but might have interesting yarns) Sunday AM with friends
  • Sunday PM – dye samples for tiger eye yardage, devise drafts for testing CompuDobby IV upgrade
  • Monday – drive up to AVL (7 hour round trip), test loom, hopefully take it home!

Yep, looks like a packed weekend.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: painted warp, tiger eye

February 17, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Another week, another warp

The last muslin is complete (and yes, the stripes match PERFECTLY!), I’ve taken a day or two for R&R, and now it’s time to launch into the next thing.  Any number of things I could do ““ quilt piecing, pattern drafting, fabric manipulation ““ the list goes on and on.  But what I’ve decided to do is wind another warp.  This one will also be painted, but in much more subtle tones ““ burnt oranges, golden yellow, rust, chocolate brown ““ all the colors of tiger-eye stone.  It will have basically the same draft as the rainbow warp ““ which I need to do in order to test the sett using 30/2 silk instead of my custom-spun silk yarn ““ but will look radically different.

Here are two simulations of the possibilities:

tiger eye simulation, staggered stripes
tiger eye simulation, staggered stripes
tiger eye draft, stripes lined up
tiger eye draft, stripes lined up

I like the staggered stripes better ““ not that they will stay lined up neatly, anyway!  In fact, with fewer colors, the odds are that the colors will “pool” at some point.  I think that’s OK with me, though.

I haven’t yet decided what to do with this yardage, but I think another jacket may be in the works!  Different pattern,  of course.  Or, I may gift it to Sharon as some small recompense for the help she’s given me.  Mostly I just need to weave up another piece using the same draft and 30/2 silk, and I figure I might as well put a long warp on the loom and get a usable length of fabric out of it.

The plan is to wind the warp over the next few days, and then dye it over the weekend.  I will probably use Lanaset (acid) dyes with citric acid, and batch it (let it sit at room temperature) for several days to “set” the colors.  In this case I’m using acid dyes rather than fiber-reactives, because I will have to mix up some colors and my Lanaset sample set is much more extensive than my Cibacron F sample set.  With a more extensive sample set, I can simply look up color combinations, rather than having to figure out the mixes from scratch.

That’s not all I’ll be working on, of course.  I still need to develop test drafts to weave on my loom whilst at AVL, and I plan to study pattern drafting some more.  I successfully drafted an armhole princess pattern yesterday, and plan to dive into armhole princess variations later this morning.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: painted warp, tiger eye

February 13, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Interlude

First, the eye candy:

Completed handwoven painted warp yardage
Completed handwoven painted warp yardage

After a frantic day and a half of winding, beaming, threading, and sleying, the new warp is on the loom.  Or rather, it was on the loom, which is now disassembled and in the back of my Prius.  I will make the 4-hour drive to AVL later today.  I plan to stop on the way to talk to Sharon and strategize the cutting and sewing of the jacket.  Since I don’t have the loom this week, it’s the perfect time to focus on sewing,  and that’s precisely what I plan to do.  (Also dyeing, quilting, and fabric manipulation, in between cleaning the house, which Mike asked me to help with.  I admit it has been months since I did any vacuuming!)  I’m hoping to get the outer shell completed, at least.

And since I don’t have much to report beyond that, a little more eye candy:

First harbinger of spring - blooming violets
First harbinger of spring - blooming violets
flowering plum tree
flowering plum tree

Yep, spring is here and doing its thing, right here in the Bay Area.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: kodachrome jacket, painted warp

February 9, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Speed and simplicity

I’ve been humming along on the painted warp (a bit past the 8-yard mark now), weaving about 3 hours/day, and have been using the intensive weaving time to work on technique.  While my left-hand shuttle throws were smooth and without wasted movement, my right-hand throws felt stilted, like I was still doing it in parts.  Throw – stop – move hand to beater, beat.  Two separate actions.  The left hand, on the other hand, was working in a single smooth action, where it would throw the shuttle and grab the beater in one fluid movement, never stopping.

So I spent some time working on just the movement of the right hand, trying to smooth out the movement between throwing and beating.  It took awhile – about 6 hours of practice – but I managed to get the right hand movement as smooth as the left hand.  Then I worked on coordinating the two hands so they moved as a unit, going back and forth in the same rhythm – another 6 hours of practicing.  Since then I’ve been consciously working on smoothness and simplicity of movement, from the moment I sit down to weave – not worrying about speed, just trying to practice the smooth flow of movement, ingraining it into muscle memory.

Of course, speed follows economy of movement.  I had warmed up this morning (it always takes about 10-20 minutes for me to “hit my stride”), and it occurred to me that with my newly smoothed-out technique, I was probably weaving faster than before.  How much faster?  I whipped out my trusty stopwatch, and wove 50 picks in 66 seconds before having to stop to advance the warp.  That’s 1.33 seconds per pick!  meaning that I’ve more than doubled my weaving speed over the past two years.  And pretty much all I’ve done is smooth out the movements, synchronizing the hands so they never have to wait for each other.

At any rate, I’m pleased to know that I’m making progress, both in ergonomics/simplicity of movement, and in speed.  Does speed matter?  To me it does.  The faster I can weave (with good quality, of course), the faster I can complete projects, and the more projects I’ll be able to fit in.  Life is short, time precious, and I want to use my time as efficiently as I can.  (Legacy of a time when I fully expected to die young!)

That’s not the same as hurrying, of course.  Hurrying is when you’re struggling to go over your maximum speed.  Hurrying usually results in feeling tense, not to mention sloppy technique.  People who decry focusing on speed while weaving usually associate speed with hurrying.  To me, speed is valuable, but it’s best approached obliquely, by fixing technique; then speed will follow, and you won’t have to hurry.

(I am reminded of a day from the time I spent working at Ben & Jerry’s.  I was the only employee in the shop, it was a holiday (Christmas I think), and a swarm of people had just appeared.  For the next two hours, I had a line out the door.  But I didn’t stress.  I worked as fast and as smoothly as possible, and somewhere around the end of the first half-hour, as I was chatting up the customer while reaching for an ice cream cup with one hand, scooping ice cream with the other hand, and closing the refrigerator with a foot, she asked, “How can you be so unflustered?  You’re the only one in the shop and there’s a line out the door!”

I replied, “Well, I know exactly how fast I can scoop, and I know I can’t scoop any faster than that, so I’m doing what I can, and not worrying about the rest.”  I was working hard, and fast, but I was not hurrying.)

Anyway – speed and hurrying aside – I am making good progress.  The end of the warp is in sight – I estimate I’ll only be able to weave another 2 yards.  That will give me about 10.5 yards of cloth before wet-finishing.  I’m estimating about a yard of loom waste, so I lost about a yard and a half to take-up and adjustment of the bouts while tying on.  That’s pretty substantial, so I’m wondering if I made a mistake in my numbers somewhere.  Nonetheless, it will be plenty (and then some!) for the coat.  I may have enough left over to make something else!

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings, textiles, weaving Tagged With: kodachrome jacket, painted warp

February 7, 2011 by Tien Chiu

(Almost) four yards!

I did not get much weaving done over the weekend – only another 1-2/3 yards.  I did, however, finish another muslin – this one is very close to correct, enough that Sharon said I didn’t really have to do another muslin, we could just make the changes in the finished fabric.  Being acutely paranoid, however, I’m doing another muslin, this time with stripes ruled on the fabric so we can see what is really happening with the stripes.

I wound up cutting about 11 feet of fabric, almost 4 yards,  off the loom last night.  While I had carefully painted the warps so the colors would not align, there is of course some “slop” in the painting, and I had reached the point where several stripes were about to start “pooling” into a much wider stripe.  This would ruin the striped effect, so I cut off and rearranged the starting-point of each bout to restore the stripes.  (This, you may recall, is why I threw the bouts up and over a trapeze in the first place: since each bout is individually weighted, I can arrange them independently when I tie on, just by pulling each bout further or closer through the reed.  It does result in significant loss of warp – I lost about ten inches off some bouts! but it allows me to arrange the striping to my satisfaction, and I have plenty of warp.)

Here is a photo of the cut-off (but not yet wet-finished) yardage:

First four yards of handwoven painted warp yardage
First four yards of handwoven painted warp yardage

I like it!  It will be glossier and drapier once wet-finished, but it’s pretty even in a “raw” state.  I am tempted to use this technique again, only in neutral colors, to see if it produces an equally stunning result in white/beige/rust, with a black  or dark brown weft.  That would be much less dramatic and more wearable on a day to day basis.

Plans for the next few days include weaving a LOT more fabric (I now need to average 2 yards a day – still do-able, but stretching it), and working up another, hopefully final, muslin.  I’m hoping to complete the yardage by the end of the day Thursday, which would give me Friday, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning to warp up the loom before I drive it up to AVL on Sunday afternoon.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: kodachrome jacket, painted warp

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